Screebl is an application that was written to do exactly one thing: keep my phone's screen from locking (turning off) when I'm using it.

I loved my T-Mobile G1 when I got it, with a few very annoying exceptions. Most of all I hated the short battery life, so I did everything that I could to increase it. This included dropping the screen timeout as low as it could go: 15 seconds. For those of you that have done this in the interest of conserving battery, you know that the result is repetetive screen timeouts whenever you're doing something that doesn't involve touching the screen. Things like looking at or showing someone a picture, watching a web page load over a slow connection, reading a long email, etc. I disliked the interruptions enough that I usually ended up raising the timeout back to a higher value, and that wasn't good for battery life.

It occured to me one day that I always held the phone in the same position when using it. This observation was the basis for Screebl. Screebl is a background service that monitors the phone's orientation, and based on that orientation decides when to allow the phone's power-saving features to operate. Watch the video below for a demonstration of how things work.